Disability Studies, Inclusive Education, and the Learning Sciences

1. Disability Studies, Inclusive Education, and the Learning Sciences Joseph L. Polman, Ph.D. University of Missouri-St. Louis

2. What are the “Learning Sciences”? • Multidisciplinary cognitive science research • Simultaneously develop • understanding of learning • educational practices • Historical development, from … • Individual information processing to mediated action involving multiple agents • Laboratories to authentic learning environments

3. Three contributions of LS to inclusive school communities • Individual processes and trajectories of active learning, building on assets • Mediation by “cultural tools” and sociocultural environment in a community of learners • Methods of conducting “design-based research”

4. Developmental trajectories • For example • Ann Brown (1992) on analogies • Noticing them to productively using them to solve problems • Surface features to deep features • Na’ilah Nasir (2004) on playing dominoes • Sustaining play with valid moves • Basic scoring • Maximizing scores, blocking, and helping partner • Teacher’s role as facilitator of active learner • Identifying and capitalizing on bridging strategies from existing conceptions/practices to more expert practices

5. Mediation of learning by cultural tools in sociocultural contexts • Vygotskian approaches to development • Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) • Individuals appropriate cultural forms to solve socially situated and culturally structured problems • Key role of dialogue and discourse (Bakhtin) • Mind “extends beyond the skin” • Hutchins’ “cognition in the wild” • Pea’s “distributed intelligence” and Salomon’s “distributed cognition” • Hakkarainen’s “networked intelligence” and Clark’s “natural born cyborgs” • Scaffolding (but not always “fading”)

6. Designing tools & environments to scaffold learning • Designing social interaction among peers and with teachers • Palincsar & Brown’s reciprocal teaching • Building communities of learners • Wenger in businesses, Rogoff in schools • Computer-based tools, e.g., for science • Diagnoser (www.diagnoser.com) • WISE (Web-based Inquiry Science Environment) • BGuILE (Biology Guided Inquiry Lrng Env) • Building on cultural resources • Carol Lee’s cultural modeling

7. Action-oriented Methods: Design-based Research • Issue of Educational Researcher (v32 no1, 2003) on design-based research • Efforts to combine strengths of • Action research • Anthropological techniques • Task analysis and/or computer modeling • Genetic and microgenetic discourse analyses • Statistical methods applied judiciously • … for research on situated learning and continuous improvement in practices • Refine theory to achieve generalizability: “frame selected aspects of the envisioned learning and of the means of supporting it as paradigm cases of a broader class of phenomena”

8. Challenges for learning sciences and disability studies • Dealing with meaningful sociocultural group categories without assuming sameness • E.g., African-Americans, males, or particular disability groupings • Not monolithic, but knowing trends may help • Group learning • How to analyze it? • Allowing for individual differences in communal processes, while not allowing low expectations (of participants or facilitators) to limit individual growth • Dealing with current political context • Standardized tests & schools’ reactions to them • Gold standard of experimental design for research

9. Keeping track of the Learning Sciences • Journals • The Journal of the Learning Sciences • Cognition and Instruction • Books • Bruer’s Schools for Thought (MIT, 1993) • Classroom Lessons, edited by McGilly (MIT, 1994) • Bransford, Brown & Cocking’s How People Learn (National Academy Press, 2000) • International Society of the Learning Sciences (www.isls.org)